For 11 years, until his departure to Brussels in 1977 to join Roy Jenkins at the European commission, he was a Labour MP. Then he was a founder member of the SDP, and during the alliance's heyday he and I had a number of very fraternal public debates. He then wrote The Unprincipled Society, after which he wrote to me saying that it had taken him a long time to realise that he was a Liberal.

After Tony Blair's election victory in 1997, David became an adviser to Blair and New Labour. Now he describes Blair as a "phoney" progressive and enters the realm of fantasy by looking to David Cameron to embody the spirit of Thomas Paine.

The inability of former and current Labour hacks such as David Marquand, Neal Lawson and John Cruddas to countenance the possibility that Liberal Democrat philosophy and thinking is remarkably akin to what they demand of Labour and Conservative leaders is symptomatic of British political myopia. Whether on the economy, Europe, ID cards, Iraq or localism, the Liberals and latterly the Liberal Democrats have been consistently right. Why look any further?

Michael Meadowcroft

Leeds

• I very much admire David Marquand's work and sympathise with his despair at the failure of the Labour party to modernise the civic state, but his hope that David Cameron could be the solution really does smack of whistling past the graveyard.

What in Cameron's previous career or current utterances in any way suggests the radicalism which would be required to "surprise us all"?